Is Faith Rational?

• “Reason” = anti-faith?

Two different questions

1. Is faith in God rationally justified?

2. Do rational arguments, overall, support belief in God?

• Why do some say that these two questions are very different?

• Because there’s (allegedly) more to rationality than just rational arguments.

• (E.g. beliefs formed by direct observation are also rational, aren’t they)

Rational belief without evidence?

1. (Pascal’s Wager) Faith is more than just belief, as it involves an element of trust, or action. Decision theory shows that, with the right payoff matrix, trust makes sense even with a low degree of belief.

2. Foundational (or “basic” beliefs) have justification in themselves, in addition to any support they have from other beliefs. (E.g. basic logical intuitions, perceptual beliefs, belief in other minds, the external world, beliefs needed for inductive inferences.)

3. (Religious experience) Beliefs based on direct experiences of God are rationally justified, just as beliefs based on ordinary sense experience are justified.

Pascal’s Wager

• In this section of the Pensées (thoughts) Pascal adopts the position that “Reason” is powerless to tell us whether or not God exists.

“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. … A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Gambling

• He also says that the question of whether or not to worship God is a wager, or gamble.

• What is a gamble?

• You do some action, knowing that it will cost you something, in the hope that you will win more later on. (The bet may “pay off”.)

• (BTW Pascal and Fermat developed the mathematical theory of probability, expected values, etc. in order to help a problem gambler, the Chevalier de Méré, who was suffering heavy losses in games of dice.)

Is it ever rational to gamble?

• Is there such a thing as a good (rational) bet?

• If so, then what makes a bet rational?

Decision Matrix

A occurs B occurs

Bet on A $5 -$2

Bet on B -$10 $4

Should you bet on A, or B, here? Or neither?

It looks as if A is a better bet. But what is B is much more probable than A?

E.g. what if Prob(B) = 0.9?

Expected utility

A occurs B occurs

Bet on A $5 -$2

Bet on B -$10 $4

In that case, Pascal said, you should calculate the expected utility of each option, and choose the option with the higher value. (Pascal used different terminology.)

EU(bet on A) = 50.1 - 20.9 = -1.3EU(bet on B) = -100.1 + 40.9 = +2.6

God exists God doesn’t exist

Worship God Eternal life in heaven () A decent life (50)

Don’t worship God A fun life, then nothing? (70) A fun life (70)

EU(bet on God) = p + 50(1-p) = EU(bet against God) = 70

But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain

against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all

divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss

against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. And thus,

when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather

than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness.

Let Prob(God exists) = p

• How can a person “bet on God” if they honestly don’t believe?

“I am not released, and am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?“

Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.

• “But this is what I am afraid of”

• And why? What have you to lose?

(Selected) Objections to Pascal’s Wager

1. Many Gods objection. “An Imam could reason just as well this way” (Diderot)

2. The utility of salvation cannot be infinite, as we are finite beings.

3. Betting on God is morally wrong, as it corrupts us.

4. Mixed strategies also have infinite utility.

1. The Many Gods Objection

• Mackie: “the church within which alone salvation is to be found is not necessarily the Church of Rome, but perhaps that of the Anabaptists or the Mormons or the Muslim Sunnis or the worshippers of Kali or of Odin”

• N.B. It doesn’t matter if some of these Gods are more probable than others. The expected utility of a bet on any one of them is infinite, no matter how small the probability!

2. Infinite utility is dodgy

• Consider the St. Petersburg paradox, where you have a chance to play a certain game. A fair coin is flipped until it lands heads, with the number of tosses determining the payoff as shown below. How much would you pay to play this game?

Number of tosses Payoff

1 $2

2 $4

3 $8

4 $16

n $2n

3. Moral objections

“One way of putting the argument is that wagering for

God may require you to corrupt yourself, thus violating

a Kantian duty to yourself. Clifford (1986) argues that

an individual’s believing something on insufficient

evidence harms society by promoting credulity. …”

(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Pascal’s Wager”)

4. Mixed strategies

• As Duff (1986) and Hájek (2003) have pointed out, a “mixed strategy” (e.g. flip a coin, and bet on God if it lands heads) also has infinite expected utility.

• In fact, any strategy which involves a positive probability of betting on God in the future has the same (infinite) utility. (E.g. deciding to bet against God?)

Alvin Plantinga on Reformed epistemology

• Are cogent logical arguments for God’s existence needed for belief in God to be rational?

• Plantinga quotes Bavinck:

“Scripture urges us to behold heaven and earth, birds and flowers and lilies, in order that we may see and recognize God in them. … It does not make God the conclusion of a syllogism, leaving it to us whether we think the argument holds or not. But it speaks with authority. Both theologically and religiously it proceeds from God as the starting point.” (p. 208)

“We receive the impression that belief in the existence of God is based entirely upon these proofs. But indeed that would be “a wretched faith, which, before it invokes God, must first prove his existence.” The contrary, however, is the truth.... Of the existence of self, of the world round about us, of logical and moral laws, etc., we are so deeply convinced because of the indelible impressions which all these things make upon our consciousness that we need no arguments or demonstration.”

Basic Beliefs

• Most (not all) philosophers accept that there are basic, or foundational, beliefs which require no evidential support (from other beliefs).

• E.g. simple, “self-evident” beliefs, e.g. 2+2=4, “I exist”. Possibly perceptual beliefs like “Here is a hand”.

• What sorts of beliefs are properly basic? I.e. what sorts of belief are truly justified without any support from other beliefs?

Classical Foundationalism

• Classical foundationalism says that, in a rational epistemic state, all basic beliefs must be infallible andcertain. The only beliefs that meet this strict standard are those that are (logically) self evident, and those that report sensory experience, “I seem to see a hand”.

• And a justified belief is either basic, or can be logically derived from basic beliefs.

• But is classical foundationalism itself a justified belief, according to classical foundationalism?

Examples of uncertain basic beliefs?

• “Nothing will come of nothing” – Anything that begins to exist has a cause.

• Other minds exist

• The external world exists

• Nature obeys simple, uniform laws.

• “If theism is true it is likely that it has its own intrinsic and basic source of warrant. Something like the sensusdivinitatis proposed by John Calvin or the natural but confused knowledge of God proposed by Thomas Aquinas”

• The Plantinga‐Dennett Debate: Science and Religion: Are they Compatible?

• (N.B. Plantinga supports design perception more than design inference.)

• Plantinga says that belief in God fundamentally doesn’t require evidence, because it is “properly basic”.

• Plantinga endorses Calvin’s view that, “a rational

noetic structure may perfectly well contain belief in

God among its foundations …”

The Great Pumpkin objection

“If belief in God is properly basic, why can’t just any

belief be properly basic? Couldn’t we say the same

for any bizarre aberration we can think of? What

about voodoo or astrology? What about the belief that

the Great Pumpkin returns every Halloween? Could I

properly take that as basic?” (p. 213)

“… the fact that [the Reformed epistemologist]

rejects the criteria of classical foundationalism does

not mean that he is committed to supposing just

anything is properly basic.”

• Plantinga admits that he doesn’t have a criterion of what can be taken as basic, but suggests that

“criteria for proper basicality must be reached from

below rather than above; they should not be presented

as obiter dicta, but argued to and tested by a relevant

set of examples.” (p. 215)

• “The Reformed epistemologist may concur with

Calvin in holding that God has implanted in us a

natural tendency to see his hand in the world around

us; the same cannot be said with the Great Pumpkin,

there being no Great Pumpkin and no natural

tendency to accept beliefs about the Great Pumpkin.”

(p. 215)

• If God does exist, then it’s at least probable that he would implant such a natural tendency in us.

• Hence, Plantinga argues, one cannot maintain that belief in God is irrational (due to lack of evidence) even if God turns out to exist.

• To show that belief in God is irrational, one needs to show that God doesn’t exist.